About this guide

Key Point: Use this guide as a style reference
for our developer documentation.

This style guide provides a set of editorial guidelines for anyone writing
developer documentation for Google-related projects.

Goals and audience

The primary goal of this guide is to codify and record decisions that
Google's Developer Relations group makes about style. The guide can help you
avoid making decisions about the same issue over and over, can provide editorial
assistance on structuring and writing your documentation, and can help you keep
your documentation consistent with our other documentation.

Non-goals

This guide is for Google-related developer documentation; it doesn't apply
to all Google documentation. If you already have your own style guide, it's
fine to continue using that.

This guide isn't intended to provide an industry documentation standard, nor
to compete with other well-known style guides. It's a description of our house
style, not a statement that our decisions are objectively correct.

This guide isn't intended to provide a complete set of writing guidelines
from the ground up. For example, it doesn't cover parts of speech, subject-verb
agreement, or other writing basics.

This guide is a living document; it changes over time, and when it changes,
we generally don't change previously published documentation to match. We strive
for consistency to the extent feasible, but at any given time there are certain
to be parts of our documentation that don't match this style guide. When in
doubt, follow this guide rather than imitating existing documents.

This guide doesn't provide legal advice; legal issues are outside its scope.
For issues relating to legal matters, consult your lawyers. In particular, the
guidelines in this document don't limit the changes that Google can make to its
documentation. Also, if you don't read a given guideline, that doesn't absolve
you from behaving ethically and within the law with regard to documentation.

How to use the guide

If you're looking for a specific topic, then do a search-in-page to see if
the topic is mentioned in the left navigation (also known as "left nav"). If
not, then try using the search box at the top of the page, which is limited by
default to search only this guide.

This guide is a reference document; instead of reading through it in linear
order, you can use it to look up specific issues as needed.

If you're new to the style guide and want to get a general sense of what our
style is, see the Highlights page.

Breaking the "rules"

Remember that everything in this guide is a guideline, not a draconian rule.
In most contexts, Google has no ability nor desire to enforce these guidelines
if they're not appropriate to the context. But we hope that you'll join us in
striving for high-quality documentation. A relevant quotation:

"Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

Like most style guides, our style guide aims to improve our documentation,
especially by improving consistency; therefore, there may be contexts where it
makes sense to diverge from our guidelines in order to make your documentation
better.